Monthly Archives: August 2015

Your boys here at Whiskey on the Rails have accumulated what we consider to be the Holy Trinity of sponsors. After some deep thoughts about what one would need to have the ultimate whiskey drinking experience, it hit us. First, you’re going to need a glass… Boy did we luck out by having the good folks from The Glencairn Whisky Glass join our team! So, now that we have the glass, how are we going to chill our whiskey without diluting it? Enter Whisky Stones. These beautifully handcrafted soapstone cubes from Vermont not only fit perfectly into the Glencairn Whisky Glass, but chill your favorite blend instantly. Want to be the envy of your buddies? Pair the Whisky Stones with a personalized Glencairn Whisky Glass and watch out! So check out this podcast and listen to our collection of sponsors of Whiskey On The Rails. Train.. Train…

Your boys here at Whiskey on the Rails have accumulated what we consider to be the Holy Trinity of sponsors. After some deep thoughts about what one would need to have the ultimate whiskey drinking experience, it hit us. First, you’re going to need a glass… Boy did we luck out by having the good folks from The Glencairn Whisky Glass Company join our team! Located in the greater Cincinnati area, glencairnwhiskyglass.com sent us some of their personalized works of art. These whiskey specific glasses are not only beautiful, but by far the best way to enjoy your favorite shot of the good stuff. The narrow mouth of the glass functions perfectly for the sniff test to be performed, allowing the true aromas to come through and appreciated then seamlessly flows in to the slightly larger bowl which is made to hold the right amount of whiskey, plus some stones(we’ll get to that in a second). The shape of the glass is extremely ergonomic to the point you won’t want to set it down. As you can see from the pictures, The Glencairn Whisky Glass is a must for any and every whiskey drinker who is looking to up their game and hang with the big boys.

So, now that we have the glass, how are we going to chill our whiskey without diluting it? Enter Whisky Stones. These beautifully handcrafted soapstone cubes from Vermont not only fit perfectly into the Glencairn glass, but chill your favorite blend instantly. The stones come beautifully packaged from whiskeystones.com, where there are numerous sets to choose from. The non-porous stones just need to be hand washed, air dried and popped in the freezer for a few hours and they are ready to roll. Three of the stones in your glass are going to take the temperature edge off without watering down your beverage and not requiring you to store an entire bottle in your freezer. When you’re finished, repeat the process and have these bad boys at the ready for your next outing. Want to be the envy of your buddies? Pair the Whisky Stones from whiskystones.com with a personalized Whisky Glass from glencairnwhiskyglass.com and watch out!

So in this blog / podcast we wanted to talk about our newest sponsors but then we also wanted to put the classic theory to the test when it comes to whiskey.. Which is better for your whiskey, Rocks vs Stones? The classic debate which we were happy to take on with a simple bottle of Makers Mark as our sample Whiskey. Each of the hosts have two separate ways of enjoying their whiskey but the end result is the same, having it cold.. Whether it be a couple of rocks in their glass or having the bottle in the freezer, each of them enjoy the whiskey cold… Well with this situation, we had to really think about our enjoyment because while one keeps it very cold (with the stones) the other serves a purpose by keeping it cold but diluting the whiskey once the rocks melt.

As we fired up the Glencairn Whisky glasses with ice and let sit for about five minutes, we watched our whiskey really start to lose some color because the ice was melting. Sure it was chilling down the Makers Mark but it was also watering down and more importantly cutting down some of that great burn you enjoy while having it neat. We are sure almost all of our readers / listeners have experienced Makers Mark but if you haven’t you are going to find it is an outstanding whiskey that uses more wheat than rye in the mash which gives it a smooth caramel and vanilla taste on the front end with a very quick and disappearing burn once it goes down.. Now when I say quick on the burn, it doesn’t stick with you like a Knob Creek Rye (teaser for the next podcast review) but it quickly burns and then smooths out as you drink it.. Now with the rocks, you really start to lose some of those upfront tastes because as water usually does, it takes away some of the bite and really taste away from your whiskey to the point where some say it is tolerable. Tolerable might be a good thing in your opinion but to us, we feel that is takes away from the overall enjoyment of the whiskey. So while on the rocks is one of our tests for our three part enjoyment, in this case it isn’t adding to the enjoyment level of the whiskey.

Now after we finished our whiskey because lets face it you shouldn’t leave a good whiskey behind in almost any situation. We did the same test with our whiskey but this time we inserted three of our Whisky Stones into our Glencairn Whiskey Glass and let it sit for five minutes. Now what do you think is going to happen once the five minutes are up? Are we going to see a change in color? Are we going to see a change in smell? Are we going to see a change of taste? The answer to all of those questions is quite simple, no you aren’t. Where Whisky Stones excels in this process is not changing anything from taking your whiskey from room temperature to the proper tasting temperature, if you enjoy it chilled. You don’t have the same issues where your whiskey is diluted and taste is taken away from the original pour from the bottle.. You get that same great taste from the moment it is pour and finished to the point you need another whiskey in your glass.

As somebody who really enjoys a cold whiskey and doesn’t look for the taste to be changed, the whisky stones don’t only fill that void to make it cold but they look completely awesome in any glass. Of course our preference would be our Glencairn Whisky Glasses but we are just giving you our two cents. If you are looking for a winning combination to complete your whiskey experience, you need to really check out our sponsors. We certainly give them our seal of approval and you will hear about them in each of our upcoming and future podcasts. We have the perfect glass, we have the perfect stones and once Hotel Tango introduces their whiskey to the general public, we will be giving you a new podcast on some great new whiskey to run out and get you some of that..

In this sort period of time since we have started this whiskey podcast, we have learned one important lesson when it comes to whiskey. Find those who have a passion of what they enjoy and you will find some excellent whiskey opportunities. With that simple logic, we haven’t only found some outstanding whiskey but we found ourselves our new Whiskey Sponsor of the show, Hotel Tango Artisan Distillery located in Indianapolis, Indiana. The guys from Whiskey On The Rails took the owners of Hotel Tango up on an offer to come down, check out their location and talk about their spirits. Which it all started with four bottles and the conversation was flowing.. So check out this entertaining podcast while we introduce everybody to our newest sponsor.. Train.. Train…Check out this episode!

In this sort period of time since we have started this whiskey podcast, we have learned one important lesson when it comes to whiskey. Find those who have a passion of what they enjoy and you will find some excellent whiskey opportunities. With that simple logic, we haven’t only found some outstanding whiskey but we found ourselves our new Whiskey Sponsor of the show, Hotel Tango Artisan Distillery located in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The guys from Whiskey On The Rails took the owners of Hotel Tango up on an offer to come down, check out their location and talk about their spirits. Travis, Brian and Adam not only opened up the doors of their historic building but they brought out some of their yet to be released Whiskey for our conversation. Let me expand upon that statement, they brought out some 60 day, 120 day and 150 day aged Whiskey which as we progressed through each bottle, they got better and better and better.. However, lets hold off on the whiskey for now and tell you more about these guys..

While the key in every good whiskey story is the whiskey, lets take a step back and tell you how this great company came together to form Hotel Tango. If you take a moment and read their story from the website you will learn quickly how Hotel Tango Artisan Distillery came together as the brainchild of Master Distiller Travis Barnes, his wife Hilary and a few of their closest friends of Adam Willfond, Brian Willsey and Nabeela Virjee (per their website). The overall naming convention reflects the military roots of Travis, who is a Marine and also the use of the military alphabet. By using the military alphabet, he took H (for his wife) and got Hotel and then took his T (from his name) and got Tango to pull together Hotel Tango. They have used the same alphabet when pulling together the rest of his spirts across the board from Vodka, Gin, Moonshine and Rum. Which I am sure in a later blog, we are going to go into a lot more description of the rest of their fine spirits. However for this introduction, we are back to being on location or at-least giving our perspective as we officially got to their location.

Hotel Tango has their operation in a beautiful historic building which used to be a horse carriage repair shop in the 1890’s. Before you even walk into the building, you are taken back by the active street traffic this building has thanks to the community. You have farmers markets, you have lively street folks and tons of individuals who are out running and biking in downtown Indianapolis. Which that right there is awesome because foot traffic brings thirsty individuals ready for something good.

When you first walk into this place, you can see some of the history from the 1890’s with the repair aspect. It is a very rustic type of building with an awesome fireplace right in the middle of the tasting room. Which both of the hosts thought it was from the original building but to our surprise, well I think we will let you listen to the podcast for that story. What might also catch your eye is their mascot who is keeping an eye on everybody who enters to make sure they don’t get out of line. Fletcher, who as it was described by Brian, is the most popular figure of the tasting room because patrons have actually called to see if he was there that day so they could see him. He might only be a cat but that is only half true because he is also half bobcat.. Which I learned if you bring your daughters lunch cooler in to keep your Whisky Stones cold, Fletcher will laugh at you and apparently so does everybody else. However that is a great story left for the podcast to tell.

Before we get back to the whiskey, let us tell you a great piece of information about Hotel Tango and honestly this was one of the biggest reasons we wanted to engage them and learn more about their story. Travis proudly served our country as a Marine and we are appreciative for his service to our great country and we made sure to thank him during our podcast for that. The coolest thing Hotel Tango can boast is they are the first craft distillery in Indianapolis but just as important, they are the first service-disabled veteran-owned distillery in the country. We both applaud the efforts of our military and we both take great pride in volunteering our time to support our military, which another great piece you can learn about in our podcast.

In our podcast you get to hear about a variety of items mentioned above but you also get to hear us talking about Hotel Tango’s Whiskey that the gentleman were kind enough to share. As I said earlier in this blog, as we progressed from the 60 day to the 200 day distilled whiskey, we enjoyed a progression of whiskey which only got better and it was distilled. Please don’t take that statement as we didn’t enjoy the first 60 day bottle because that was the furthest statement from the truth. Each of the bottles started getting more color from the time it spent distilling in their barrels which started to add some great complexity in each tasting. To Eric’s enjoyment, he got that burn in each of the bottles which made him really excited to keep tasting and trying, which you will certainly hear more about during the podcast. While we want to keep this as much as a teaser as possible, words can’t describe how great the spirits were that we tried and the company that joined us for this podcast. We had been looking forward to this podcast recording for almost a month and we left extremely excited to work with this awesome company.

Which all great things should be celebrated and we have one final piece to celebrate. We are proud to announce is Hotel Tango and Whiskey On The Rails have created a partnership for Hotel Tango to become our official Whiskey Sponsor of Whiskey On The Rails. Each of our guests, each of our social media questions, all of our call-ins / call-outs and our periscope videos are all going to be sponsored by Hotel Tango. You will continue to see all of their social media promotions, upcoming activities and general spirits promoted on our website and social media campaigns. We look forward to a great relationship and even more look forward to recording on location in the upcoming months. We will certainly be promoting our upcoming recordings if you would like to come down and share a drink with us during our recording, you are more than welcomed. Which this is a teaser, they are the first of our three sponsors we are going to be announcing over the week. So stay tuned to our announcements, check out future blogs and more importantly check out our podcast with Hotel Tango.

While we are taking our journey on the rails, we get the pleasure of mixing in some of our favorite whiskeys in the weekly podcasts and blogs. We know that we aren’t always going to pick a winner at random, so when we have the control on the choosing our whiskey, it makes for an easy podcast. Plus when one of the hosts is a virgin to the whiskey, it just makes life even better. So this week, we are talking about one of Beam Suntory’s own whiskeys, Basil Hayden’s. In the next couple of weeks, we are going to be talking about new great things coming down the line for our listeners.. So check out this entertaining podcast while we were drinking on the rails.. Train.. Train…Check out this episode!

While we are taking our journey on the rails, we get the pleasure of mixing in some of our favorite whiskeys in the weekly podcasts and blogs. We know that we aren’t always going to pick a winner at random, so when we have the control on the choosing our whiskey, it makes for an easy podcast. Plus when one of the hosts is a virgin to the whiskey, it just makes life even better. So this week, we are talking about one of Beam Suntory’s own whiskeys, Basil Hayden’s.

Thanks to a whiskey dinner at Claude & Annie’s in Fishers, Indiana, one of our hosts had the pleasure of drinking this wonderful whiskey before the event began and was educated on the proper way to say the whiskey’s name. “Ladies and Gentlemen, yes the collection of whiskey’s we have had tonight does come from the same location as Basil Hayden’s and no it is not pronounced like an herb like I heard earlier in the evening” was said by our whiskey host.. Yeah, that guy who said it wrong earlier was yours truly.. When we were recording another podcast, I made the comment before dinner that it was one of the whiskey’s I was introduced to by a local patron during a bartending shift. Which that is when I learned, if you pronounce something you enjoy incorrectly you better be willing to be the butt of jokes for the evening.. Oh well, I just had to drink a few more..

So when we brought this whiskey into the recording for our podcast, we learned that the other host had never had this whiskey. He is a beam guy and never had this whiskey.. He was a virgin, a whiskey virgin to Basil Hayden’s fine whiskey.. You know what, this is an opportunity when you want to take care of one of your friends and make sure he is no longer a virgin.. When drinking whiskey, that is the rule.. I am not sure about other areas but hey, only in whiskey.. I even shared my original story on when I first met Basil Hayden’s whiskey.. People say that love at first sight is rarely achieved and/or rarely possible but I gotta believe this was love at first sight when I first tried the whiskey.. Alright, maybe I am sharing too much information and we should go into some information about the podcast.

As we have said before in our tasting, we try it three ways.. Neat, Rocks (soon to be stones) and finally with a mixture. Honestly, I didn’t want this tasting to make it past the second step because this whiskey isn’t meant to be mixed with coke, diet, sprite, ginger ale or even dr. pepper.. No No No.. It is meant to be served neat.. It is meant to be served on the rocks.. After trying it for a new podcast, it is awesome with whisky stones. It doesn’t deserve to be mixed to take away or hide the great taste. You should never, ever order this drink at your local waterhole with a mixture.. If you want a great whiskey mixture with soda, please just order a Beam and Soda (which is something I enjoy).. It was save you money.

However in this podcast, we did get to enjoy quite a few samples of this great whiskey. Thanks to our followers on Twitter and Periscope, we did field a few questions during the podcast. One question specifically was what sort of a cigar would go better with this whiskey. While I will keep that as teaser, we did talk about a few different cigars that might hold up but sadly a black and mild didn’t make the cut.

While we keep on drinking, we hope that people are enjoying our teaser blogs for our upcoming podcasts because we are enjoying each of the whiskey’s we have tried. There is no better feeling than introducing one of your friends to one of your favorite items. In this case, my whiskey.. I suppose the only thing that would have been better would be him paying for it.. Yeah, that might do. Stay tuned for the podcast on Whiskey Wednesday’s.

Alright, so as we gear up for another podcast, Eric and Rob looked up at the scoreboard and decided to pick Number 6 – Lexington Bourbon Whiskey for our horse in this race. Well horse race or a podcast, it all has a starting point, a half-way and at times a photo finish. We took this opportunity to bring together another opportunity for something new. Check out this entertaining podcast and remember.. Train.. Train

Alright, so as we gear up for another podcast, Eric and Rob looked up at the scoreboard and decided to pick Number 6 – Lexington Bourbon Whiskey for our horse in this race. Well horse racing or a podcast, it all has a starting point, a half-way and at times a photo finish. We took this opportunity to bring together another opportunity for something new.

While working your way through the bourbon trail, you will certainly stumble upon some great whiskey’s and outstanding distilleries. You can have that same experience of finding new liquors while venturing through your local liquor store.. Granted there aren’t samples, an expert tell you the history about the whiskey’s or even cool people to share the experience. What you do have is a history lesson with each whiskey bottles in the store because each tells a story..

Well this story was sort of a ruse at first because I saw a bottle that looked like a Woodford Reserve on sale for $29.99 and said, holy crap!!! Once I started getting closer to the bottle, I realized that it wasn’t anything close to what I originally thought but the price still had my attention and it was something I had never had before so I figured this was a great bottle to try three different ways on the rails..

As we fired up on our recording, we got to learn something real quick about this whiskey.. If you take it lightly, it will burn your face off.. Yes, that is more of an inside joke that you will get during the podcast but it had a great burn when you tried it neat.. The burn and overall heat quickly went away once we added some ice and water to the whiskey. It made the whiskey a bit more tolerable because it took the edge off and really took away from that bite we might have feared once we tried it but actually look forward to it, once we try our whiskey’s.

We have made the statement prior, if you have to provide a mixture on the best way to enjoy your whiskey, it might not be the best whiskey to try unless you are saying “whiskey & coke please” to your bartender. Lexington’s website provided a drink called the “Horse’s Neck” in their mixology section. Well this was a drink that we fired up in our third section with some ginger-ale, bourbon and while we didn’t add it you would need a dash of bitters to complete the drink. This caused a first between the two hosts because the two completely disagreed on the taste of this drink.

We both enjoy ginger-ale for our mixtures when it comes to whiskey’s but this drink wasn’t favored at all by one of the hosts. Yes, another teaser for listening to the podcast because the story each told on the flavoring really showcased our bartending skills. Yes, another bartending plug.. At the end of the day, we added this whiskey to our shelves and found some great ways to drink Lexington Bourbon Whiskey. There are some great details in our podcast, which will be released on Whiskey Wednesday. Check out our additional thoughts on the podcast and look forward to your thoughts..